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Dumpling Manifesto

When I lived in Taiwan in the early 1990's, sometimes after school let out my classmates and I would take in a quick, inexpensive meal at one of the tiny dumpling shops found in the maze of shops and restaurants near the Mandarin Training Center (a.k.a. Shi Da) where we studied Chinese. These shops would crank out jiaozi, commonly called "potstickers" here, by the hundreds and line up the fresh, crescent-shaped dumplings on trays awaiting cooking to order. Each one cost $3 NT, the equivalent of about twelve cents in U.S. dollars. A solid meal consisted of ten jiaozi, though in my ravenous moods I would occasionally down twenty at a sitting. As a "fiscally challenged" student, I loved being able to eat for a buck twenty U.S. There was no tipping, and hot tea was complimentary, so you were out the door leaving only three $10 NT coins on the table. Eating out at a restaurant for only three coins? That's medieval! There was even free entertainment in the form of chihuahua-sized rats darting through the dark nether regions of the restaurant (unfortunately eating medievally came with lower hygeine standards).

Classically the jiaozi is filled with pork and minced vegetables, but often they were available in other variations such as lamb or vegetarian. The jiaozi were prepared simply, either pan-fried, or boiled. If the latter, you optionally could enjoy your dumplings dunked into hot and sour soup (a style of eating I have never seen elsewhere actually). My favorite way was "straight up," simply boiled and dipped into soy sauce and vinegar at the table. Ah, those were good eats!

Back home the quality of dumplings can be much more uneven. A Consuming Ambitions reader forwarded me a humorous article in which the author vents his "dumpling rage":

Dumpling rage, like road rage, strikes without warning. My first attack came in my mid-20s, while dining at Raku, a Washington, D.C., "pan-Asian" restaurant. I made the mistake of ordering something called Chinese dumplings. Out came a bamboo steamer containing what resembled aged marshmallows-dumplings cooked so long they were practically glued to the bottom of the container. Try as I might, I could not pry them loose, until one ripped in half, yielding a small meatball of dubious composition.